[GLLUG] Bootable USB Stick

[Charles Ulrich]

Which distribution? Any halfway decent distro these days ships ISO 
images suitable for both burning to a disc and writing to a USB drive. 
Just dd the image right to the device. If your USB stick shows up as 
/dev/sdb, then:

   dd if=file.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

And reboot! Note that not all machines of a certain vintage will 
successfully boot from USB, even if they claim to be able to.

Thanks,
Charles

On 11/05/2015 09:47 PM, Chick Tower wrote:
> I wanted to upgrade a disto on my IBM ThinkPad T41, but it appears that
> the CD/DVD drive no longer works.  I tried setting up grub2 to boot the
> .iso file for the live/installation CD, but that hasn't worked yet. Then
> I thought I'd make a bootable USB stick, using an 8GB one that I don't
> use much and is still pretty new.  However, that's not going well,
> either.  Even when I select during boot to boot the USB drive, nothing
> happens for a while and then the normal grub2 menu pops up.  Has anyone
> had much success creating a bootable USB stick?
>
> I tried using dd to copy the .iso file to the stick, but that doesn't
> work.  I tried unetbootin on Manjaro Linux, but that doesn't work.  I
> consulted the Arch wiki and found this page
>
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/USB_flash_installation_media
>
> It says unetbootin doesn't work, but it's directions on editing the
> incorrect file don't help me because mine doesn't look anything like the
> example on that page.
>
> I haven't tried the method of copying the files from the mounted .iso to
> the mounted USB stick, but it might be the one that works.  Now I think
> I'll just mount the hard drive in my ThinkPad T42 and install it there
> before returning the hard drive to the T41.
>
> Does anyone have any advice for creating a bootable USB?  Is it possible
> to create one using a distro that is not related in any way to the one
> in the .iso file?  I don't want to use Win7 to do this, so please don't
> suggest that unless it's the only way.